Rooting for BP

In reading the countless articles, and blogs targeting BP as the bogey man of the day, I see the kind of mass hysteria that would have caused an African American, caught at some heinous crime, to be lynched without a trial, when lynching was still an option for irrate white folks.

It appears that many residents of Louisianna, and other affected states, but more so environmentalists, and other activists, would love to see the British behemoth bleed to death. It also appears that laywers of all kinds are sharpening their knives in order to carve up whatever part of BP they think they the can get their hands on.

While I don’t want to downplay the magnitude of the tragic events that have occured, and continue to occur, I would like to remind people out there, that ultimately we are dealing with an accident. Accidents happen, often as the result of bad judgement, or because somebody just made a mistake...

Could this one have been avoided? Probably. Could 9/11 have been avoided, if somebody at the CIA, or at the FBI had shown better judgment? Probably. Could the space shuttle Columbia desaster have been avoided? Probably. How about the Lehman Crash? How about most wars, past and present? Probably.

The redundencies we put in place to prevent really bad accidents, are only as good as the engineers, or strategists, who implement them, and then look after them. Typically though, there is almost always something dumb, negligent or just unfortunate, at the root of some desastrous decision; just think of what happened in 1914, after Sarajewo, or think of those little, bitty heat tiles coming off a Billion dollar space shuttle… Now considering that BP has not planned this, and is therefore not the perpetrator of a heinous crime, but rather – like us – the victim of an accident, caused probably by a combination of negligence, and by a number of unfortunate events, that happened to occur at the same time...

And further considering that BP has bent over backwards to jump in, and fix - at all cost - this leak in “outer space”, where it could well be, in view of the difficulites involved just getting to it.

… And further considering that BP has pledged $20 Billion in a good will gesture to assure those folks in the Gulf who have been affected by the spill, that there will be funds available for their claims….

… Considering all this, it seems to me that BP is not getting enough credit for taking full responsibility, for their massive efforts to stop the first major deepwater oil leak ever, and for their unconditional readiness to deal with the damage this oil leak has caused to man, beast, water and land.

At this point in the game we should be rooting for them. We should encourage them – "Go BP, Go!!!" And we should tell them that we’ll keep buying heir products, if they manage to fix this problem, and clean up the mess.

There is no use in a big company such as BP being pushed up against the wall, or worse towards bancrupcy. Who would benefit from something like this? Not the American government. Not the American taxpayers. Not the British, and the American retirees, and other investors holding BP stocks, and living off it’s (previously) healthy dividends.Not the locals. In the end, the only winners would once more be the lawyers orchestrating the break-up of BP, and the company / companies that would buy whatever is left of it in the end.

We need to have a positive outlook here. After all we are in this together. We have known since the Seventies that we need to cut down on the consumption of fossil fuels, and that we need to develop alternative fuels; there are plenty of technologies around… and what have we done? We have turned the SUV into the best selling type of car instead, and we are shipping bottled water from one end of the world to the other, so that an Aussie in Sidney can sip Evian from France....

No, you don’t want to kill the Golden Goose, and this one is truly golden. Just imagine if the spill had been caused by Amarok alone? Or by anyone of the even smaller oil companies out there? Fixing the leakwould have ended up entirely in the hands of the government, and we all know what a great job the government did, when Katrina hit that same area, that’s bleeding again now.

You want this BP goose alive, and kicking, and making tons of money in going forward, so it can payout – over time – the many legitimate claims that will be lodged against it, and so it can turn itself around, and become a model energy company, with a focus on safe oil extraction, and on the development of alternative energy sources.